De kogel is door de kerk: as we already talked about earlier, Opera is going to switch to the WebKit engine, leaving its own Presto rendering engine behind. We didn't yet know if they would the switch only on mobile or on the desktop as well, and they cleared that up too: both mobile and desktop Opera Browsers will switch to the WebKit rendering engine.

The only major thing that makes Opera Software special is (IMHO) Opera Mini, how it allows many more people to connect and/or lower the costs of doing that. It's certainly the only really popular Opera product.

And they don't stop development of Mini; also, nice thing about it: swapping of the engine can be done virtually transparently for users. "
[I'm only including your comment in the reply to have a better written reply, not to disparage it...]
Counterpoint: not in all cases does special == popular. [My desktop browser in windows 98 > bsd v5 > bsd v6 > bsd v7 > bsdv8 > bsdv9 [presently] ... Opera, it consistenly loads quicker. lends to user customization, plays nice with tabs, does what one would expect... ]
I expect if/when I am forced to use a newer webkit version, if it isn't as stable/speedy, there would
be alternatives. But not looking forward to it.